DALE DRINNON: The Da Nhan and Rock Apes of Vietnam

This was an area where I had some personal input in gathering stories from both ex-soldiers and displaced Vietnamese in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first word of it I heard came as rumors from returning soldiers claiming to have run into Orangutans in the jungles. I had extensive confabs with both Vietnamese informants and several American soldiers: the Vietnamese called the creatures Da Nhan and the Americans usually called them Rock Apes. There also seemed to be some difference between the Jungle apes and the Rock apes which sounded like there were differences in the populations corresponding to lowlands and mountain gorillas. All informants agreed that the creatures were upright stoutly-built apelike creatures with reddish brown to dark brown hair between the sizes of a gorilla and a chimpanzee. The Vietnamese showed me in their dictionaries where a gorilla was a "Big Da Nhan" while an Orangutan was a "Small Da Nhan" I have one reference (from the Russian via Porshnev) that they left "Snowman" (Yeti) tracks.

My information was important enough that the SITU, and then Heuvelmans and Loofs-Wissowa contacted me directly about it. I had quotes from soldiers that the apes would be rifling through their supplies and one soldier said his unit spent more time fighting the Rock apes than they did with the Viet Kong. These reports came through the Indiana University Anthropology department where one of the professors opined that it might be "A funny sort of Orangutan" although the lack of physical evidence bothered him.

I wrote my first report including the descriptions from my interviews and the secondhand accounts and submitted it to the SITU in 1982. After some fumbling around (the SITU sent it back to me for a rewrite but I never got the parcel), I made a final submission of the article in 1991: the article was ultimately never run in PURSUIT.

Here is the same basic story told from an internet source:

Vietnam: the ‘Rock Apes’ of Quang Tri, Thua Thien and Quang Nam Provinces, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

American soldiers used the term ‘rock apes’ during the 1960 and ‘70’s Vietnam conflict, which described an unknown (to them) creature, about a meter to a meter and a half tall, (about 3' 4" to 5 feet tall) resembling an hair-covered ape with the exception it was larger than any local ape, tail-less and to the great surprise of the soldiers, they walked upright

An alternate military source, a former GI wrote using the term ‘Powell’s ape,’ after one of the creatures wandered into a restricted zone during the middle of the night. Powell was the name of the platoon leader. "All hell broke loose when the dark figure continued to advance into the far end of the restricted zone, it was fired upon."

"When daylight came, we realized we had blown the living shit out of a large ape, it was a male with the face of a wild man and not much else left of it to describe of the stinkin’ thing. We poured fuel over the remains and set it afire." (From the 1995 Nam bulletin board)

Another GI offered this description: "An oblong head framed the hair-covered face. Dark, deep-set eyes lay beneath a prominent brow, and they did nothing to complement the heavy jowls and angry mouth. As it stepped into a small clearing, Linderer could see that matted reddish-brown hair ran down the creature's neck and covered most of its body. Whatever it was, it stood at least five feet tall, had broad shoulders, long thick muscular arms, and a heavy torso, it walked upright."

In the small clearing, it stopped and studied the Americans. "What the hell is that?" someone called out from behind Linderer. "It's a rock ape," said another member of the squad. Another team member disagreed. "No, it ain't," he said. "I've seen rock apes, and that sure as hell isn't a rock ape!"

"It's an orangutan, well isn't it?"

Linderer asked while the others kept their eyes glued on the strange creature. "Well, if it is, then he can't read a map. There are no orangutans in Vietnam."

Jorgenson, Kregg "P.J.," 2001 "Excerpt from "Strange but True Stories of the Vietnam War --Very Crazy G.I." Ballantine Book Publishing Company pages 33-36

Heuvelmans' checklist of Cryptozoological candidates (CRYPTOZOOLOGY Vol. 5, 1986) includes this entry under the Oriental realm:

"Anthropoid apes (Probably mainland orangutans surviving from the Pleistocene, or just traditions about them), in Assam (olo-banda, bir sindic), Burma (ui-wun), Southern China (xing-xing) and Vietnam (kra-dhan, con lu'o'i, bec-boc)"

In this case, Olo-banda is the same as 'Mahalangur', Big Monkey. I have heard an Indian man point to a gorilla at a zoo and describe it to his daughter as a 'Mahalangur'. The Kra-Dhan and Bec-Boc are named directly by Sanderson as candidate giant Macaques, but they are clearly the same as the Da Nhan and Rock Apes of Vietnam, with very nearly a verbatim description.

And the Xing-Xing are the apes that Poirier and Krantz are identifying as the orangutan-like Yeren, a creature that Krantz has called "Pongo erectus" (or else Yeren, in the final issue of CRYPTOZOOLOGY. Both names are necessarily invalid.)

There is more than one direct continuity of types from these mainland apes to the Abominable Snowmen or Yetis, and Heuvelmans' checklist entry for the Yeti is immediately following the "mainland orangutans" one (We are temporarily sidestepping the issue that "Fossil Pongo" cannot actually be Pongo) Heuvelmans mentions that the Yeti has been known since Classical antiquity (I do not know which ancient writer he means because he does not cite the source) and he ends the entry by saying "it is equally possible that the so-called Snowman is merely a particular kind of orangutan, more terrestrial than the tree-dwelling kind." Without reaising the fact, he has hit upon the key argument about "Fossil Pongo": "Fossil Pongo" was a large (Gorilla-sized) ground-dwelling ape while modern Pongo, the orangutan, has a number of specific and peculiar adaptations to arboreal life. Hence it is very likely that the Yeti (s well as the rest) are merely surviving "Fossil Pongo", but the genus NAME for "Fossil Pongo" is yet to be decided. Hence the "Discovery" of all of those types hinges on a decision about the placement of the known fossil form.